Personal tools

Recognizing an inspiring woman for Ada Lovelace Day: Audrey Tang

by
kxra
Contributions
—
Published on
Oct 15, 2013 05:14 PM

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, a day for
highlighting women making great contributions to science,
technology, engineering, and mathematics. This is a holiday of
particular importance to the free software movement, to remind us
that there are powerful social biases which permeate our
movement, sexism and transmisogyny being just two of these.

Ada Lovelace Day gives us an opportunity to recognize contributors in
our movement and show them the appreciation they deserve. A personal inspiration I want to write about is Audrey
Tang (Traditional Chinese: 唐
鳳), an astonishingly impressive Taiwanese free software hacker.

She most famously initiated and led the Pugs project, a Haskell
implementation of the Perl 6 language which grew into a large joint
effort from Haskell and Perl communities. Tang also served on the
Haskell' (pronounced "Haskell
Prime") 2010 committee, working to shape the language
standard. Importantly, she has contributed to many localization
efforts for both free software projects and led many Traditional
Chinese translation efforts for various books.

At age twelve, she began learning Perl and has initiated an
astounding number projects since then. She dropped out of high
school at 15, and by 19 she had held positions in multiple
software companies. As such, she is a vocal proponent of
anarchism as well as an autodidact (self-directed learner).

In addition to the Pugs project, she started the popular Perl
Archive Toolkit (PAR), a cross-platform packaging and deployment
tool for Perl 5. PAR is just one of over a hundred Perl projects she
initiated on CPAN, becoming one of the first to make that
incredible achievement. More recently she created
EtherCalc, the popular collaborative
spreadsheet web application parallel to EtherPad. On a more
political front, she has been working with
g0v.tw on using free software
to build accountable and transparent infrastructure for public
participation. On a more literary front, she worked build a
popular web and mobile dictionary app for
Chinese education that combines Mandarin, Taiwanese Holok, and
Hakka with English, French, and German.

As such a brilliant hacker, it's no wonder that she was described
in 2006 as one of the "ten greats of Taiwanese
computing."
Recognizing Tang and other women in our global community gives
people who can identify with her the ability to see their own
potential for in free software.

It's also important to consider the values, ideologies, and
behaviors that contribute to the exclusion of marginalized groups
in our community. The Women's
Caucus was
started in September of 2010 to address issues of gender in the
free software movement. Women of color may also join the
Empowermentors Collective to address
white racism and other intersectional forms of oppression in
relation to free culture and free software.

We are honored to have supporters like Audrey Tang and so many
other women in the free software movement. We hope you'll recognize
the women who inspire you as well.